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The author, Michael J. Bazyler, is a Professor of Law, and an attorney who specializes in Holocaust-related litigation. He was born to Holocaust survivors, and grew up in postwar Lodz, Poland. (p. xiii).
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Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski was, after the capture of Grot Rowecki by the Germans, the head of the entire AK guerilla movement. Bor includes a detailed account of underground life and an impressive list of Polish sabotage actions against the German occupant (pp. 152-154). The AK was careful to calculate maximum benefit from its actions for the cost in German terror reprisals, but the Communist AL had no such scruples (p. 171)
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To correct the countless errors and partial-facts of this book would require a book in itself. (For more details, see the first Comment). I can only touch on a few matters in this single review.
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This book addresses the German rule over Poland--but only from September 1939 through the end of June 1941, which is just when Operation Barbarossa had begun. There were 3 more years of brutal Nazi German occupation, followed by decades of Soviet rule over Poland.
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Former ambassador Stanislaw Kot introduces this work. Although Witos had passed away in 1945, these memoirs were not published until nearly twenty years later, and then by the Polish émigré community, because the Soviet-imposed Communist puppet government in Poland refused to publish them. [This is perhaps ironic because Witos is of peasant stock and of strong peasant identification, and is often critical of landowners and sometimes the Church.]
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Having partitioned Poland, both the former Soviet Union and Germany set about imposing their administration on the territory under their control. In the German occupation zone, the western provinces (Silesia, Pomorze, Poznan, most of Lodz and part of Warsaw, Cracow, and Kieke Provinces) were annexed to the Reich by a decree of 8 October 1939 and were known as the Wartheland. They accounted for an estimated 35,000 square miles with an estimated 9.5 million of Poland's pre-war population. In the remaining area which fell under German control, the Nazis established a "General Government" which was intended as a labor colony of the Reich. It incorporated an estimated 37,000 square miles of territory-including the cities of Warsaw, Cracow, Radom, and Lublin-and 12 million inhabitants. The seat of power was established at Cracow with Hans Frank, a Nazi lawyer being appointed governor. The Nazi occupation marked the beginning of almost six years of unspeakable horror for the Polish people.

Within days of the German invasion of the former Soviet Union in June, 1941, all Poland as constituted in September, 1939, came under German control for the first time. In a new administrative division, the southeastern regions were transformed into Distrikt Galizien with its administrative headquarters at Lwow, which was incorporated into the General Government. To the east, the remaining territories became Reichskommissariats of the Ukraine and Ostland-the latter incorporating also the Baltic nations. Poland was now divided between the Reich (30.8%), the General Government (38.8%), and the Eastern Reichskommissariats
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It would be a mistake for the uninitiated reader to suppose that this diary is provincial--limited to events occurring in and near Kovno, Lithuania. Based on obviously-extensive Jewish and non-Jewish contacts, it also features much information on the unfolding fate of Jews in other places, notably in German-occupied Poland. More on this later.
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